CRM is becoming increasingly important in today's economy, where customers can choose from a variety of competing goods and services. Consequently, enterprises have developed elaborate databases and techniques to better understand their customers and keep their customers satisfied.
A variety of off-the-self CRM software utilities exist in the industry which permit the collection, organization, and analysis of customer transactions and interactions with an enterprise. Some of these utilities interface with data warehouses, which organize and index customer data and provide tools for accessing and analyzing the data.
One task an enterprise concerns itself with is identifying a target customer population for a designed marketing campaign. This task is often referred to as customer segmentation. CRM utilities and tools permit enterprise's to define market campaigns and develop related search queries that can automatically define the customer segmentations, which are the objects of the campaign.
These conventional CRM tools have predefined databases, schemas, and other metadata related to an enterprise's particular environment, which are manipulated and used when creating and defining marketing campaigns and customer segmentations. If new sources of data are relevant to resolving customer segmentation, then these new sources of data must be manually integrated and mapped within the tools. In many cases this is not an optimal situation, especially when the timeliness of customer segmentation is of vital concern to an enterprise.
Consequently, many business analysts will attempt to create needed customer segmentations outside the confines of existing CRM tools, when these segmentations are dependent on sources of data which have not yet been mapped to the CRM tools. This results in ad hoc approaches throughout an enterprise that are not re-usable, results in many manual errors, and results in undesirable time delays, since the business analysts must figure out how to integrate the customer segmentations back into the existing CRM utilities once acquired.
Therefore, there is a need to create improved techniques for generating customer segmentations for marketing campaigns, when data sources associated with the segmentations are not pre-mapped within existing CRM segmentation tools and utilities.